What words do we need to understand our increasingly digital world? Technologies shape our lives and the culture that we live in. Digital technologies increasingly define human beings and the choices we make. This course takes up important words used to think about technologies and culture and help us explore the relationship between them, both theoretically and in our own evaluation and use of digital tools and applications.  It will engage with words connected to big concepts--for example, code, ethics, network, knowledge-- to expose their complexity. Words change and develop, so we will be exploring them in relation to the history of technology, as well as connecting them to big questions surrounding current concerns including COVID-19, #BlackLivesMatter, Indigeneity, environmentalism, hacktivism, Google search, and Youtube recommendations.

Guest lecturers from across the university will introduce keywords alongside compelling readings. Real-time and online group discussions will unpack interconnections among technologies, ethics, culture, and society, in response to formal and online texts, podcasts, and videos. (Required materials will be available online.) Students will learn to write for a web audience through the creation of their own weblog, which can form the basis of a portfolio of digital work completed over the course of their university career.